If you are looking for concrete outright racist statements from Helms I don't think you will get them. But if you insist that's what you need, I'd have to say you either don't get it or you're just being willful. When the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" was inherently racist, those who advocated "separate but equal" would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they weren't racist. They just didn't want integration. Real estate agents or employers are never racist, unless they get caught in a systematic pattern of discrimination. If a police department had no black members in 1964, it had to be clear evidence of racism, yet no person would be singled out as "The Racist" in the police department. So what you think you are looking for probably doesn't exist. Helms vilified anyone who presumed to tell his constituency they had to change anything about their comfortable American form of apartheid, whether it was lawyers who went to "some fancy Yankee law school," northern "liberals" who wanted to "stir up discontent, or the Justice Department. He may never have said words you would consider incriminating. It was the way he used to say "nigra" that made my blood boil. It was like he wanted to say nigger but he knew he couldn't get away with it. He twisted his face into some grotesque mask and spit the word out with venom, like he couldn't stand even the taste of it, the sound of it coming from his mouth, ........not unlike the way Rush says "liberal" these days.
If you are looking for more than that, I'd say good luck finding it. |
